October 18, 2018
I like to buy vinyl records from collectors on discogs. To add them to my digital collection I record them to PCM and then convert to a lossless format. For many years that meant Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) which most people have never heard of and is an excellent lossless format. It compresses PCM audio down nicely and is supported (with extra work) on most operating systems and devices--but honestly it's a struggle because it is not part of the Apple ecosystem. I did read somewhere that FLAC is now supported on the iPhone (which has become my digital audio player) but I have never actually tried getting that to work.
When I started buying digital music I used to opt for the WAV or FLAC formats but these days because I am mainly on apple devices I go with AIFF or ALAC so that I can get the full quality of the recording as well as track titles and artwork embedded in the files themselves with no additional work.
ffmpeg is free software that provides the algorithms / process for converting between many audio formats. It's available for many platforms, and there is a pre-built Windows binary. These are commands I have found useful for batch conversion.
for %F in (*.flac); do ffmpeg -i "%F" -strict experimental -y -c:a alac "%~nF.m4a"
for %F in (*.flac); do ffmpeg -i "%F" -c:a alac -c:v copy "%~nF.m4a"
for %F in (*.wav); do ffmpeg -i "%F" -acodec alac "%~nF.m4a"